All the Big Changes the Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick Adaptation of ‘A Simple Favor’ Made From the Bestselling Book Prove We Could Have Had a Radically Different Movie

What starts off as A Simple Favor turns into something much darker in Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively‘s humorous noir together back in 2017. Paul Feig directed this twisty hit that was actually based on a novel of the same name by Darcey Bell. Naturally, there were some minor details that were changed, like the insurance payout bumping up from $2 million to $4 million, the addition of the iconic “brotherf*cker,” and the creation of the snarky Darren (Andrew Rannells), who was always ready with a one-liner and a silent hybrid car. While the majority of the narrative beats were adapted into the film, the source material was surprisingly a tad more sinister, especially towards that final act.

‘A Simple Favor’ Changes the Book’s Structure

A Simple Favor tells the tale of a woman disappearing and her friend and husband grieving, only to then investigate her fake death. Both the book and the film begin the story from Stephanie’s (Kendrick) point of view, a mommy blogger (vlogger in the film) who befriends her son’s friend’s mother, Emily (Lively). While the film sticks with Stephanie’s perspective throughout its runtime, the novel is actually split into three major acts, with the second and third being told from Emily and her husband Sean’s (Henry Golding) points of view, respectively. As such, the book has a sense of unreliable narration to it as we experience each act from a different perspective, whereas the movie takes a step back through Stephanie’s investigative approach.

While this change may feel minor, it actually changes the characterization of these central players, particularly Emily. In the novel, she is far more stoic and less likely to blurt out zingers like “Nicky would be better off if I just blew my brains out,” since much of this is in her non-dialogue text. Lively’s rendition of the character brought these elements to life, which fed into why people weren’t so shocked about Emily’s disappearance, unlike in the novels, where Emily hid this acidic side to herself. We are also privy to the information that Emily specifically picked out Stephanie to look after Nicky, and it wasn’t necessarily a chance meeting that united them.

Personality-wise, Stephanie was also a bit creepier in the way she pursued Sean, who was a real estate agent, not a one-hit-wonder writer. Their romance didn’t bloom organically and instead had darker undercurrents of coping with the loss of Emily, mixed with the fact Stephanie kept changing herself for him, most noticeably eating meat after years of being fervently vegetarian. Instead, Kendrick gives a more innocent performance as Stephanie and a more inquisitive one. Because the story is told from Stephanie’s perspective, the movie adds in a detective storyline in order to glean Emily’s backstory, where Stephanie follows clues from a painting to a camp to Emily’s mother’s (Jean Smart) house. In the book, Stephanie simply visits Emily’s mother on a whim (and notably, without the disguise of a cleaner).

Emily and Stephanie’s Backstories Are Different in ‘A Simple Favor’s Movie

It is not only the method of discovery that is different, but also the backstory itself. Through Stephanie’s investigation and a series of flashbacks when she confronts Emily, we find out that Emily was a part of a set of triplets: Hope, Faith, and Charity. Charity died in the womb, leading to Hope and Faith getting flames and the charity symbol tattooed on their wrists. In the novel, Charity simply doesn’t exist, and the twins have barbed wire tattooed on their wrists, with no ulterior meaning other than being connected. This triplet facilitated a chilling aspect to Emily’s backstory, where Hope and Faith rebelled against their abusive father (who believed they were evil due to Charity’s death) by setting fire to their house and killing him. As such, they changed their names to Claudia and Emily and went on their separate paths, explaining Emily’s vehemence against taking her picture. In the novel, they never committed arson and thus never changed their names, except Hope/Claudia was actually named Evelyn in the book.

In both versions of A Simple Favor, Emily’s sister is an alcoholic and drug addict, but her death scene differs. The movie takes a direct approach, where Emily consciously makes the decision to kill her sister and holds her head under the water until she drowns, cemented after Hope/Claudia asks her for money. The novel takes a slightly more ambiguous and arguably more spine-tingling approach as Evelyn meets her sister at the cabin with the plan of killing herself instead of trying to extort her for money. Emily rushes to the cabin to save her sister, but when Evelyn decides not to follow through with her plan, Emily realizes that she needs her sister’s corpse for her insurance ruse. However, instead of drowning her, Emily plies her with alcohol and manipulatively nudges her towards her eventual suicide.

While Stephanie’s backstory involving the partially-incestuous relationship with her half-brother is the same in both versions of A Simple Favor, we only confirm it through flashbacks in the film. The novel, however, includes Stephanie actually admitting the incest to Emily, who secretly recorded the entire conversation. The film sees Emily subtly using references to this piece of information to make Stephanie uncomfortable, but the novel escalates this to full-blown blackmail, as Emily continuously holds this over her head, placing further pressure on Stephanie in the finale.

‘A Simple Favor’s Book Ending Had a Murder and Getaway Plan

The ending of A Simple Favor is where the novel and its cinematic adaptation truly drift apart, all hinging on Emily’s lie and, surprisingly, Stephanie’s job. The film changed Stephanie’s job from a blogger to a vlogger, not only to suit the film medium but also to allow Stephanie to livestream Emily’s confession to her followers. In that finale, Emily tries to pit Stephanie against Sean, convincing her to pin everything on him (accentuated by domestic abuse claims through a wrench-induced bruise) and using a recording of him claiming to use her. However, Stephanie sees through Emily’s lies and eventually manipulates a confession out of her, and in the closing scenes, we see Emily in an orange jumpsuit dominating the prison yard.

In the book, Emily has a bit more success with her lie—Stephanie believes Sean was behind the plan. It also helps that Sean was actually partly complicit in the novels; he didn’t know about Emily’s twin and genuinely believed she had died but was involved in the initial insurance plan. On top of this, Stephanie faced the pressure of Emily potentially using the recording of her incestuous confession against her. But there was one more element that cinched Emily’s ability to get away with her crime in the book: murder. The movie briefly introduced us to an insurance agent, but in the book, this agent investigated the claim a little too closely, leading to Emily murdering him. She forces Stephanie to help her get rid of the body by pushing the agent’s car off the side of a cliff. But she also purposefully planted some of Sean’s DNA in it and accidentally left her own ring in it.

In the novel’s finale, Emily manages to convince the police that the ring left in the car belonged to Stephanie, but before we have any confirmation of whether the charges stick, Emily runs away, taking Nicky with her. The open ending of the book absolutely doesn’t have any of the satisfaction that the film delivers, but it evokes its own Gone Girl-esque chill of “she got away with it.” But out of all these changes in the process of adapting A Simple Favor, the one we are most grateful for is swapping out white wine with the luxury of a meticulously prepared martini.